What is a Good 3-Bet Percentage in Poker?

What the stat counts

3-bet percentage is the share of hands where you re-raised when facing exactly one raise preflop. The denominator is the part people forget: it is not every hand you play, it is only the hands where exactly one player had raised when the action reached you. That makes it a conditional frequency, and it has two consequences. First, a 3-bet percentage cannot be compared with a VPIP or a PFR, which are shares of all hands dealt. Second, it arrives slowly, because you have to be dealt a hand, somebody has to open, and nobody else can have re-raised first. Squeezes — a 3-bet with a caller already in — are usually counted separately by trackers, and they are a different decision, so it is worth knowing which your HUD is showing you.

Where the band comes from, and how often to 3-bet

The 5-10% guideline is a population figure, and our range library lets you check what a sound strategy actually produces. Counted in combinations of the 1,326 starting hands, the curated 3-bet ranges are:

• •Against an under-the-gun open: 2.6%. A range that tight opens tight, so there is nothing to attack and your 3-bet is pure value.
• •Against a cutoff open: 4.8%. Value plus a slice of hands that can keep barrelling.
• •Against a button open: 8.3%. The button opens 40.0% of hands against the 9.8% under the gun opens with, and the wider the opening range, the more of your own range profitably re-raises it.
• •Squeezing over an open and a caller from the button: 5.1%. Dead money in the pot, two capped ranges to fold out, but two players who can call.

The average is a consequence, not a target

Weight each of those ranges by how often that seat is the one who opened — button opens are the commonest at the table, early opens the rarest — and the overall frequency comes out at 5.8%, which sits in the lower half of the 5-10% band. Two things follow. A player at 5% is not automatically a nit; they may simply face a table of tight openers. And a player at 10% is not automatically aggressive; if the figure is built from 3-betting early opens rather than late ones, it is the same number describing a worse strategy. The model behind that 5.8% assumes every seat opens the library's range and nobody limps, which is exactly where it stops being true: a limp-heavy table gives you iso-raises instead of 3-bets, and a table of maniacs gives you far more of both.

What sits outside the band

Under the band the cost is not the pot you failed to win — it is the pots you play instead, flat-calling out of position with a range you have advertised as capped. Over the band the cost depends entirely on which hands you added. Weak suited aces and suited connectors against a late open have a plan for the flop; offsuit broadways against an early open have none, and they fold to the 4-bet that the strongest opening ranges are built to make. The practical test is not the number at all: it is whether you can name the flops you keep betting after your 3-bet gets called, and whether your 3-bets fold out anything at all.

How long before your own figure means anything

You need about 430 chances to 3-bet before a 95% interval on your own frequency is narrower than the 2.5-point half-width of the band. The opening model says somebody has raised before you act on 34.9% of hands, so that is roughly 1,200 hands — several times what VPIP and PFR need, and that is for the single average. A per-opener breakdown, which is the only version worth acting on, needs a multiple of it again. Until then, treat an opponent's 3-bet percentage over a few hundred hands as a hint about their style and nothing more.

Check your own figure

The free leak report computes your 3-bet frequency from a hand history and marks it against this band, alongside the fold-to-3-bet figure that tells you whether your own opens are being attacked. The range library holds the three curated 3-bet ranges quoted above if you want to compare hand by hand rather than frequency by frequency.